davextreme

Runaways by Brian K. Vaughn is a series I always meant to read but never got around to. Last week Marvel posted the first issue for free on its iPad app, so I figured I’d read it to see if the series was as good as I’d heard (short review: not as good as Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man, but good enough that I bought the rest of the issues Marvel had online). It gave me a chance to see how reading comics on the iPad is.

Marvel’s app is done by comiXology, which also has an app called “Comics” and one for Boom! Studios. The basic principle is this: you can read the comic page-by-page, or you can double-tap on a panel and enter “guided view”. The iPad’s screen is about 80% the size of a standard American comic book, which makes the size of most letterers’ text just a smidge too small for my eyes to comfortably read. For some it might be great. If you hold the iPad sideways and and stretch the image to fit its width, it’s a nice large size. You have to scroll up and down to read the bottom half of each page, but I don’t mind. Unfortunately, Marvel’s app doesn’t remember your zoom level, so each time you turn the page you have to zoom in again. (Marvel: Comic Zeal does this perfectly.) In “guided view”, the app zooms in to show you just one panel at a time. It ends up feeling halfway between reading a very, very long newspaper comic strip and watching a slow-moving cartoon. Guided view by default “letterboxes” the rest of the page, so you only see the one panel you’re reading. I prefer to see the neighboring panels, so I turned letterboxing off.

Design-wise, Marvel’s app places too much focus on its store and not enough on reading the comics you’ve already bought. There’s a “Browse” button in the upper-right that lets you navigate by series or authors, but the main pane needs a few options for sorting by read/unread status, publication date, etc. Marvel oddly requires you to sign up for a free account with them before you can buy anything, despite transactions themselves being made as in-app purchases with your iTunes account. I assume Marvel wants you to make an account so it can track your reading habits more precisely than whatever Apple provides. You have to buy issues individually and can’t subscribe to a series. The app claims that it will send a push notification when new issues go up for sale but I haven’t seen one so far. The ability to download a batch of issues at once would be very nice.

Comics cost $1.99 from Marvel’s app. That’s one or two dollars cheaper than new comic singles, but if you consider that most storylines run 4-6 issues, the digital price winds up being about the same as buying the trade paperback from Amazon. Indie publishers in comiXology’s Comics app charge $0.99 for some books. Comic retailers are terrified that readers are going to stop going to comic book stores and go digital. Rhetoric from the publishers to retailers is that the digital copies will help get new readers interested in comics and drive them to stores, but I can’t see that happening all that often. Maybe people will sample an issue online and decide to buy paperback or hardcover collections, but are they going to pay full price in a comic book store, or get 35% off and free shipping from Amazon?

In general, the comics industry doesn’t know exactly how to react to digital distribution. It’s sort of fun to watch all the different publishers play around in this new frontier. Smaller publishers are more willing to experiment. DC doesn’t have any digital offerings at all. Marvel has a few hundred books in its store, but it’s still experimenting. One of the big debates is around how quickly new comics should show up online. Personally I don’t think it’s a big deal for there to be a lag of six months or so (like DVD releases vs. movie theaters), but so far Marvel is just publishing older stories from a few years ago. Ideally they’ll start a regular publishing schedule so people can start following ongoing series. In time the publishers really need to make sure all of their output is online, not just a few flagship titles.

Verdict: I don’t personally intend to stop buying physical comics, but if you’re someone who has interest in a few series, iPad reading will be great for you. No need to go into a specialty store every week. Quick gratification. The art looks nice on the iPad’s bright, colorful screen (though I wouldn’t complain if both the artwork and the screen itself had more resolution).

Con: Anything you buy is locked in the app, so your ability to read the comics again in a few years hangs on how long Marvel keeps the service going. Record companies eventually agreed to do away with copy protection, but I don’t see publishers just offering PDF copies of their books. Personally this makes me very wary of investing in the platform heavily, but for light, casual reading, it’s probably okay.

Recommendation: Immortal Iron Fist by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and David Aja. Doesn’t require much foreknowledge of the character, has lots of kung fu action.

Marvel’s entry onto the iPad, powered by Comixology’s software, works pretty well. The pages are about two-thirds the size of a normal comic page but are quite readable, and you can double-tap on a panel to make it it zoom in for a closer look. (By default, the app blacks out other nearby panels when you do this. I prefer to see the art in the context of the rest of the page; you can turn off this “letterboxing” in the settings.) At present there are a few hundred titles in the store, from what I’ve seen all at $1.99 aside from a handful of free samplers. Purchasing seems to be through your preexisting iTunes account, so it should be easy, but you do have to create a free Marvel account first (which the app tells you in a warning message, but doesn’t offer to send you to the signup page—un-Mac-like). $2 sort of seems pricey to me, but it’s dollar or two cheaper than what new titles cost in a comic book store. Marvel’s already under intense pressure not to ruin its own print business, so in that context it makes sense. Still, ten issues for $20 is the same price as a nice hardcover of that same book, but maybe it’s time to stop comparing print to digital.

Here are my recommendations of what I’ve found in Marvel’s initial offering:

1. Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday. This run was very fun, the art is solid, and the story doesn’t require much foreknowledge of prior storylines. It has some good Whedonesque dialogue, as expected. (They have issues 1-24, but I don’t see the Giant-Size finale, oddly.)
2. Captain America by Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting. This volume started in 2004 and has run for sixty-odd issues by now. When Brubaker’s done telling his whole story I have little doubt it will be regarded as among the best Captain America runs in Marvel’s history.
3. Civil War by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven. This was the biggest “event” Marvel did last decade. It poses interesting questions about how law & order would be possible in a world with super-powered vigilantes, and Captain America jumps out of a helicarrier onto a jet airplane.
4. Invincible Iron Man by Matt Fraction and Salvadore Larocca. This series is going on right now and deals with some of the fall-out of Civil War, and the events that followed it. Not quite as friendly to new readers, but the recap pages explain the basic status quo and it’s been a fun ride.

I also saw two issues of The Immortal Iron Fist up. If they go back and put the others in, Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction’s fun kung-fu story ran for about 15 issues and was a lot of fun.

Am I going to stop buying print comics in favor of digital ones? Doubtful. I’m going to sample a few different apps and see how good the reading experience is, and while I like the idea of saving a bit of money, I have serious worries about the longevity of the platform. All of the files you “buy” from Marvel’s app, and likely from other competitors’¹, are locked in that app. Your iPad’s files are backed up by iTunes, but the files themselves require the app and will disappear if its provider leaves the business. If Marvel were just selling PDF copies of its comics, I’d be able to back them up and read them in other software theoretically forever even if the iPad turned out to be a flop. I hate using the term “collectible”, because it conjures up images of comics as investments and not stories to be enjoyed, but I’d like to think a kid buying comics online now will be able to read them again in twenty years. (Won’t somebody please think of the children!) Then again, I had comics at 10 I’d love to read again but can’t find. So while there’s no guarantee of permanence no matter what you do and what format you choose, publishers did start using acid-free paper when they learned that old books were disintegrating. It’d be nice if the iPad offerings were doing something more future-proof since we know it’s better to have an unprotected file than one locked in a particular app in a particular kind of tablet.

1. Marvel has its own app, and the Comics app by Comixology contains books by IDW and other publishers. DC has nothing right now and hasn’t said anything concrete about its digital plans. This seems profoundly stupid for the company, but potentially it can wait and see what success Marvel has at getting people reading comics on their iPads and then launch its own app in a few months. ↩

The iPad, as rumored, looks like it could be a great device for reading comics. But having a computer in the right size and form factor is only part of the battle. Someone has to develop an app for reading comics and negotiate deals with the publishers. Here, then, is my unsolicited advice to would-be digital comics providers.

1. Use a standard format, if possible. Give us or ePub files so that they can be useful in other apps and easily backed up.
2. Don’t try anything too fancy with flashy panel zooms. Just give us the full page and let us pinch and pan around using the iPad’s native gestures. And please, no animated motion comics.
3. If held portrait, the iPad should give one page at a time. Landscape, we should see two pages at once, for double-page spreads.
4. Offer individual issues for sale, and offer subscriptions to titles. I should be able to buy, say, just Green Lantern 50, or subscribe to it and be notified & charged whenever a new issue comes out.
5. Ideally, if I have all my subscriptions set up, all I have to do is launch the app and start reading. It will automatically download and sync any new books.
6. Charge whatever you want, as long as it’s cheaper than the print editions, and provide a discount for subscriptions. A comic that’s $3.99 in print needn’t be 99¢, but it shouldn’t be $3.75.
7. Let me download any book I’ve purchased from any machine I log in from. If my iPad breaks, I shouldn’t have to worry about losing all my comics. File management should basically not exist, the app should just appear to have all of my comics on it. Maybe it really has only the unread and recent issues in local memory, but it downloads older books without me noticing.
8. Publishers: don’t make your own app. No one wants to have to buy a DC app and a Marvel app and a Dark Horse app and an Image app.
9. But avoid signing exclusive deals with a particular provider, unless, after a time, a true market leader in iPad apps emerges and it makes sense for everyone to use that one.

Right now, in order to buy a monthly comic, one has to go out and find a comic book store and make a special trip once a month. Generally this means that the only people reading comics are serious fans who read 10, 20, or 30 titles a month. Digital distribution combined with a handy device means that casual readers can dip in. Kids who can’t get their parents to drive them to a comic book store could use an iPad to read just Amazing Spider-Man with their allowance. Joss Whedon fans could read Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Season Eight, even if they have no interest in reading anything else. (Though by all means, suggest they read his Astonishing X-Men, and from there Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, his current Batman & Robin, etc.) There’s a huge difference, and thus opportunity, between someone having to go out and find a store vs. them already holding on in their hands. Whoever makes the most comprehensive, least flashy comic reader app will get my vote.

I wonder if it’s possible that all the worry around the Web about the iPad is, perhaps, not the iPad’s fault. Surely there’s nothing about a computer that’s just a touchscreen and only runs one program at a time that will bring about the downfall of civilization.

I do think there’s a lot to worry about how Apple’s leaning lately, though. If the iPad represents Apple’s future, we certainly should be concerned about a future in which one computer company has complete say over what programs you can and can’t run (and takes a 30% cut of all the sales).

But the concern isn’t about that, even, if it? If Apple really were to move all of its products to a closed system like the iPhone, Windows and Linux would still be out there. The concern is that, well, we all really like the Mac. Apple’s products are well designed and fun to use, and I do think I’m much more productive on a Mac than on Windows. We don’t want to have to stop using Apple products because of the company’s censorship. For years, we’ve loved using Apple computers and we stuck with the company through its “beleaguered” years. We humored people who thought that Macs were just good for graphics, and Windows was for doing real work. And having stuck with the company for all these years, we don’t want to see it turn into Big Brother. Apple has a shot at becoming the new Microsoft, an evil empire, and make no mistake: app censorship, closed designs, and DRM is how it could get there.

Apple could solve the problem very easily by simply allowing the ability to download and install apps by dragging them into iTunes in addition to using the App Store. If there’s a concern about hackers trying to take down the cellular network or whatever, maybe unapproved apps could be wi-fi only. Making the SDK free would help, too. The current developer fee could even stand for people submitting apps to the app store.

In 1988 Donald A. Norman wrote about computers of the future in The Design of Everyday Things:

This imaginary calendar looks like a calendar. It’s about the size of a standard pad of paper, it opens up to display dates. But it really is a computer, so it can do things that today’s appointment calendar cannot. It can, for example, present its information in different formats: it can display the pages compressed so that a whole year fits on one page; it can expand the display so that I can see a single day in thirty-minute intervals. Because I frequently use my calendar in conjunction with my travels, the calendar is also an address book, notepad, and expense account record. Most important, it can connect itself to my other systems (via a wireless infrared or electromagnetic channel). […] The computer is invisible, hidden beneath the surface; only the task is visible. Although I may actually be using a computer, I feel as if I am using my appointment calendar.

This sums up the iPad, I think. It’s the first computer that’s not a computer. It’s just the internet, or a calendar, or your email, without most of the other stuff you used to have to know about operating a computer. But it’s not like “real” computers are going to go away, is it? The strength of the iPad may well turn out to be that it does limit what you can do with it, so that it can be perfect for the few things it does well, and stays out of the way the rest of the time.

There’s no question that Apple is doing a bad thing for everyone (but itself) when it becomes the sole decider on what we can do with our computers. But it’s this business decision, not the iPad, that’s the problem. Clearly the tablet format has some potential. The crew of the USS Enterprise uses them all the time, and they’ve saved the entire universe a few times.

10″ Tablet with 16×9 Screen

Check out the photo of the device in this Engadget article. The iPad doesn’t have a widescreen display because it would be a strange shape for reading books. (I’m still surprised they didn’t go 3×2, but you think they didn’t build a few at each difference size/shape combination before settling on what they’re going to sell?)